Currently people are forced to exercise indoors on fitness equipment without any interactivity, resulting in a boring experience that requires significant willpower to start and continue, resulting in considerable lack of motivation to keeping in shape, much less form healthy exercise habits. In the preferred embodiment the problem is solved by turning exercising on a piece of fitness equipment into an interactive, exciting, and motivating video game experience.
Another existing problem is active or fitness games have yet to penetrate the home in any significant degree; while an arcade game can be successful enough to support a proprietary solution, no single game, or even small set of games, is sufficient to motivate the consumer to make a substantial hardware purchase. Industry-wide support must be shown before most consumers will adopt a platform.
The current market solutions are inadequate. Proprietary solutions generally target niche markets and may consist of a proprietary hardware device, such as a bicycle or treadmill, an interface, and some proprietary software that runs the application; the user is require to supply the platform, usually a personal computer (PC). These solutions are closed, meaning there is absolutely no support for their devices other than from a few choice partners, and their costs force pricing high far above the mass-market.
Other approaches rely on the use of existing games that do not work off-the-shelf as fitness games. Further, because the devices do not provide a way to equally compare the effort put forth by two competitors, these devices can't be used for head-to-head competition or even friendly training.
In prior devices, there is no feedback from the device, so they cannot be used for interactive games or competitive events, and the settings of speed and incline or resistance are absolute, not relative, which means that a given workout is only good for someone within a narrow fitness range. Someone more fit than that range will find the workout too easy; for someone less fit the workout is too hard.
The preferred embodiment is based in part on two observations: most people find aerobic exercise boring and active games are very popular in arcades.